Jessica Salmon, the magnetic and (don’t call her) messy protagonist of Lena Dunham’s new Netflix rom-com Too Much, has just arrived in London when she gets a little cheer-up about her love life. “Do not be nervous,” a guy she barely knows tells her. Hotties “have curves, and you’ve got a … big, beautiful ass.”
Thing is, she’s not nervous. And we’ve never seen her worried about her curves. That’s something Jess and the actor who plays her, Megan Stalter, have in common. “I’m so lucky to love my fat ass,” Stalter recently told Glamour, and she’s right: With all of society telling women since the beginning of time that the size of our ass (and boobs and thighs) is the most important thing, simply being comfortable in one’s skin is actually radical.
I should know. I was born with the vascular disorder Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome, which deforms my back and right leg. In addition to being Us’ executive editor at large, I’m an author, and my memoir, I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: and Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body, is about existing in an unconventional, fat body. So I’m invested in seeing more representation in Hollywood, but shouldn’t we all be?
Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, tells Us, that yes, we “see more body diversity on television” these days and can celebrate it, “but that’s partly because the bar was on the floor.” For a long time, we’ve seen “Infinitisimal amounts of more representation and we’re constantly being told that that’s enough. So like, there’s a fat girl on something—is everything better now?”
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She points to HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, starring Bridget Everett, as an example of a show that got things right by letting protagonist Sam “be a full human being,” as opposed to, say, the fat friend or villain or person whose entire storyline revolved around weight and/or the desire to lose it. (The critical darling was — criminally — not renewed after a third season.)
Adds Osborn, “We see more fat people on TV but not at the level of population representation in any meaningful way” — and often not at a level of fatness mirrored by the real world. That is, even the supposedly fat characters are quite small in the realm of the fat spectrum. But things are improving: “We’re seeing more protagonists,” she says, “and more sidekicks with depth. They’re not just the funny fat friend or the awkward fat friend. They’re the fat friend who has a true storyline and it’s not always about their weight.” She liked Hulu’s Single Drunk Female for this, and specifically Lily Mae Harrington’s character Felicia: “She has a real storyline of her own. It’s a small storyline, but a real storyline.” (Single Drunk Female: another critical success, canceled after two seasons.)
April Lockhart, who has a limb difference, is a fashion influencer who has unwittingly become a disability advocate. “I didn’t set out to be Miss Rachel,” she tells Us. “I’m, like, trying to go to Fashion Week.” But in 2022, she started a series called Normalizing Disabled Fashion Girlies on social, with the goal of “helping people see that disabilities are very much the everyday. One in four people is disabled. It’s so common.”
You’d never know it, judging by American TV and film. And for Lockhart, seeing people who are different or disabled or fat or anything else “other” is important: “The more you see it, the more familiar it becomes.” She adds, “I don’t want to pretend that I always have it all together and I’m always feeling my best … but nowadays, it’s such a big part of my platform and that’s also helped. What’s the point in hiding it now?”
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Perhaps most critically, says Lockhart, “we haven’t really seen people with disabilities in a cool light yet.” We’ve seen the inspirational but not the aspirational; the fashion girlies like Lockhart and me, just going about our lives while having limb differences and being fat. She shares the story of a friend with a facial difference, who says that typically in TV and film, people like him are the bad guys. Take, for example, characters like the Penguin or the most on-the-nose-named character ever, Scar: the Big Bad of The Lion King, who is known for his…scar. “We’re normal people with cool jobs doing cool things, and I think this is a secondary factor to us in a lot of ways.”
Nor must fat or deformed characters be perfect (because no one is). Insisting that they be to be is just as demeaning. Osbourn mentions Baby Reindeer, and critiques about the main antagonist Martha (Jessica Gunning) being fat (e.g. “Why did she have to be fat to be the crazy stalker lady?”). “Fat actors of all genders should be able to play all different kinds of roles without them being accused of making the world worse for fat people because they played some fat role where the person wasn’t an angel. We don’t have enough breadth of representation to hold that.” She makes a great point: “Whatever you think of that character, that was a brilliant performance by that actress.”
She is also quick to clarify that we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much for the small bit of improvement we’re seeing. In terms of Hollywood representation, yes, we’re seeing growth; but “fat people in the real world have to contend with not being able to use public transportation because the seats are too small, or being publicly harassed, or systemic medical and employment discrimination.” None of those are storylines that I’ve seen anywhere, at least not as a way to other or exoticize a character.
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In episode three of Too Much, Jess has a moment of uncharacteristic insecurity with her new boyfriend, Felix (Will Sharpe), who tells her, “You’re sexy. You know you’re sexy.” And he’s right. She does know. It’s as if she thinks she needs to seem insecure because it’s expected of her. Too Much is part fairy tale, so yes, this idyllic world in which the size and shape of Jess’ body is mostly irrelevant, especially to her new beau, is a bit of a dream. The important part is that Jess is a person who is not stick-thin, whose story does not revolve around the fact that she is not stick-thin.
Which is all to say: More. Of. This. We’ve come a long way, baby. And we still have a long way to go.
